That's not why NVIDIA cannot open their driver. It's been said by them time
and time again that the drive contains 3rd party code that they have a
limited license for, and as such, cannot expose that code to non-licensees.

You're looking at it wrong. Nobody really wants them to open source

their driver. Okay maybe because it's easier. But people really want
to be able to write their own driver. But they won't or can't release
the necessary info because the software has to tie so thigtly in with
the hardware. And to be honest, even if they would be able to open
source their own drivers, I doubt they would.

That's really a bit of a red herring. Even if they released the
blueprints and VHDL and documentation and everything associated
with their GPUs, it would take *months* to set up a fab to produce
them (even for ATI). All it would do is provide some insight into
the next generation, because the current would be obsolete before
even ATI could reproduce them in meaningful quality and quantity.
-Roberto Sanchez